Michiko Kakutani’s Picks for 2011

November 21, 2011


Michiko Kakutani’s Picks for 2011
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN: THE ART AND SCIENCE OF REMEMBERING EVERYTHING by Joshua Foer. A smart, funny meditation on the mysteries of memory featuring the author, in a Plimpton-esque turn, undergoing a year of memory training and competing against the country’s best mental athletes in the U.S.A. Memory Championships. (The Penguin Press, $26.95)



VAN GOGH: THE LIFE by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. This minutely detailed biography of the Dutch painter explicates his life and art and the alchemy between them, chronicling his struggles with depression, his perseverance in the face of continuing rejection, his voracious assimilation of other artists’ techniques and the radiant evolution of his work. (Random House, $40)



ROME: A CULTURAL, VISUAL AND PERSONAL HISTORY by Robert Hughes. The former art critic of Time magazine gives us a guided tour through the city of Rome, excavating its bloody past and deconstructing its artistic masterpieces even as he creates an indelible portrait of a city that still stands today as “an enormous concretion of human glory and human error.” (Alfred A. Knopf, $35)



THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: NINE STORIES by Don DeLillo. This collection of short fiction, written between 1979 and 2011, offers telling insights into the author’s fascination with the chaotic margins of contemporary life. The title story, featuring two nuns who work in the desolate South Bronx, is a small miracle of storytelling in itself. (Scribner, $24)



THE TALIBAN SHUFFLE: STRANGE DAYS IN AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN by Kim Barker. In recounting her adventures as a reporter in one of the most dangerous regions of the world, the author captures both the serious and the seriously absurd conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, using black humor to convey the sad-awful-frequently-insane incongruities of war. (Doubleday, $25.95)



THE PALE KING by David Foster Wallace. Pieced together from pages and notes that the author left behind when he committed suicide in 2008, this sprawling novel, set largely at an Internal Revenue Service office in the Midwest, depicts a nation plagued by tedium and meaningless bureaucracy. By turns brilliant and stupefying, maddening and elegiac, it’s a book that sheds new, retrospective light on Wallace’s hallucinatory vision of America. (Little, Brown & Company, $27.99)



THE TIGER’S WIFE by Téa Obreht. In creating a portrait of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war, this stunning debut novel moves seamlessly between the gritty realm of the real and the more primary colored world of fable, exploring the role that storytelling plays in people’s lives when they are “confounded by the extremes” of war and social upheaval. (Random House, $25)



BLUE NIGHTS by Joan Didion. An elliptical yet searing inquiry into loss, this devastating memoir traces the author’s efforts to come to terms with the death of her daughter Quintana Roo — who died in 2005 at age 39 — and to understand Quintana’s life. Moving back and forth between recent painful memories and bright family snapshots from the past, the book becomes a melancholy meditation on mortality and time. (Alfred A. Knopf, $25)



THE ART OF FIELDING by Chad Harbach. This accomplished first novel is not only a baseball classic — right up there in the pantheon with “The Natural” by Bernard Malamud — but it’s also an affecting story about friendship and coming of age, tracing the intertwined lives of five engaging characters at a small college near Lake Michigan. (Little, Brown & Company, $25.99)



BOOMERANG: TRAVELS IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD by Michael Lewis. Using his uncommon ability to make virtually any subject interesting, the author takes us on a surreal trip through some of the countries hardest hit by the 2008 fiscal tsunami — including Greece, Iceland and Ireland — and in doing so, makes understanding today’s headlines about European sovereign debt both fascinating and lucid. (W. W. Norton & Company, $25.95)